A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze
Daniel Colson
Translated by Jesse Cohn

A provocative exploration of hidden affinities and genealogies in anarchist thought

Is the thought of Gilles Deleuze secretly linked to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s declaration: “I am an anarchist”? Has anarchism, for more than a century and a half, been secretly Deleuzian? In the guise of a playfully unorthodox lexicon, sociologist Daniel Colson presents an exploration of hidden affinities between the great philosophical heresies and “a thought too scandalous to take its place in the official edifice of philosophy,” with profound implications for the way we understand social movements.

“In a creative and yet precise way, Daniel Colson brings together two lines of thought – philosophy from Spinoza to Leibniz – and anarchism from Proudhon to the present day. At their intersection he discovers an affirmative and expressive anarchism that rejects all forms of resentment and negativity. This is anarchism as joy and empowerment rather than sadness and accusation.” – Todd May, author of The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism

“Colson’s Lexicon is an inspiring resource for conceptualizing anarchism: it offers new, exciting paths for exploring anarchism with French thought and French thought with anarchism.” – Iwona Janicka, author of Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism

“Offers a line of thinking that connects disparate thinkers ranging from Proudhon to Simondon to Nietzsche to Deleuze… What emerges is a radical challenge to the insistence on dialectic resolution, to occult left teleologies, and to the certainty that past anarchists have nothing to say to contemporary anarchists.” – James Martel, author of The Misinterpellated Subject

Bio: Daniel Colson is a professor of sociology at the Université de St.-Étienne in Lyon. He is the author of Trois Essais de Philosophie Anarchiste: Islam, Histoire, Monadologie (2004) as well as several studies of French labor history.

Jesse Cohn is an associate professor of English at Purdue University Northwest. He is the author of Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics (2006) and Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture, 1848–2011 (2014).

280 pages, 6 x 9
ISBN 978-1-57027-341-4
Release to the book trade April 2019

Released by Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson

Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life.

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

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